A week had passed, and she could not escape from the knowledge that something had happened to her in that week. Yet what an absurd drift of dreams was this that she was suffering. The moonlight and the mystery were making her morbid and hypersensitive. To-morrow she would walk out into the sunlight and meet him face to face in the thick of a casual crowd. All the web of self-consciousness would fall away. She would find herself talking to a big, brown-faced man with steady eyes and a steady head. He was proof against such imaginings, far too strong to let such fancies cloud his consciousness. Moreover they were becoming real good friends, and she imagined that she understood him. She had been too much alone this week. His magnificent and kindly sanity would make her laugh a little over the impressions that had haunted her in the gardens of Latimer. * * * * * CHAPTER XII A WEEK’S DISCOVERY Those who saw Lynette’s swoop towards her heroine attached no esoteric meaning to its publicity. A sage green frock and a bronze gold head went darting between the figures on the Fernhill lawn. Mrs. Brocklebank, who could stop most people in full career, as a policeman halts the traffic in the city, discovered that it was possible for her largeness to be ignored. “Lynette, my dear, come and show me——” Lynette whisked past her unheedingly. Mrs. Brocklebank tilted her glasses. “Dear me, how much too impetuous that child is. I am always telling Gertrude that she is far too wild and emotional.” Mrs. Lankhurst, who was Mrs. Brocklebank’s companion for the moment, threw back an echo. “A little neurotic, I think.” Mrs. Lankhurst was a typical hard-faced, raddled, cut-mouthed Englishwoman, a woman who had ceased to trouble about her appearance simply because she had been married for fifteen years and felt herself comfortably and sexually secure. An unimaginative self-complacency seems to be the chief characteristic of this type of Englishwoman. She appears to regard marriage as a release from all attempts at subtilising the charm of dress, lets her complexion go, her figure slacken, her lips grow thin. “George” is serenely and lethargically constant, so why trouble about hats? So the good woman turns to leather, rides, gardens, plays golf, and perhaps reads questionable novels. The sex problem does not exist for her, yet Mrs. Lankhurst’s “George” was notorious and mutable behind her back. She thought him cased up in domestic buckram, and never the lover of some delightful little _dame aux Camellias_, who kept her neck white, and her sense of humour unimpaired. Lynette’s white legs flashed across the grass. “Oh, Miss Eve!” Eve Carfax had stepped out through the open drawing-room window, a slim and sensitive figure that carried itself rather proudly in the face of a crowd. “Lynette!” “I knew you’d come! I knew you’d come!”